Our session is on using text expanders within D2L and our work supporting D2L users. A text expander is basically a database that uses short abbreviations you create to expand into longer text blocks, snippets, emails, URLs, addresses and so forth. It is a great time-saving device.

Here are the resources and references for our poster session:

Our Top Five Uses for Text Expanders:

Tech Support: sending commonly asked questions for tech support or common troubleshooting techniques for regular questions

Grading: adding commonly used phrases or resources for grading discussions, quiz feedback and other assignments

Common HTML Code: Brandon uses it for adding Easy Proxy links within the D2L HTML Editor to prevent it from messing up the links.

With graduation looming at the end of this week, there will be a slew of new graduates ready to hit the job market and start a new chapter of their lives. It is a very exciting time for everyone at the college!

Because of the job searches that are undoubtably going to commence in the very near future, we thought it would be interesting to share a few new tools to create a dynamic, visual resumé to augment (or perhaps even replace) the traditional paper based one. We could call it Resume 2.0 but that is alreadydone and there is even a class on building your “Resumé 2.0″ .

On all of these sites, be sure to find the setting for creating a custom URL for the page/site so you can keep your username/profile name consistent across the services.

Custom Profile URL for LinkedIn

LinkedIn

Looking at the granddaddy of online resumés, one should start with a LinkedIn profile. It may not be the most lovely of the online options but it certainly has lots of people looking at it and for job seekers, that is not a bad thing.

About.me

You can use About.me to create a personal homepage without knowing any code. It can be a central location to bring together all of your other social presence identities such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Instagram and more. Once your about.me page has been created, you can embed it in a blog, share it via multiple social networking sites and add a link to your email signature to help centralize your social identity site.

About.me allows you to customize your background image by either selecting one of their options or uploading your own image. You can then add as many or as few connections to other social sites as well as add information such as work experience, education and a biographical statement. They even offer a set of free business cards via Moo that point to your about.me profile page! Another nice aspect is the statistics page which shows how popular your page is with views and how many click-throughs you get to your other social sites.

Example of about.me page

Vizify

A newer option is Vizify which gives you a very spiffy, higher graphical central location to bring together your social media/networking presence from sites like LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter. If you don’t use those services or do not want to share those with potential employers, then Vizify is not the service for you. But, if you want to share in a very interactive and graphical way, check it out. You can share your Vizify with services liked Facebook, Twitter, Google + and even Pinterest once you have your profile complete.

Example of Vizify site

So, congratulations to our graduates! We hope everyone enjoys their time off after a busy spring semester and go create a visual resumé to share your accomplishments!!

I am presenting to the BUSN 2520 classroom being taught in the NEXT Classroom this semester on the topic of Web Curation. WIth the continuing and seeming never-slowing rise of content being created and shared on the web, it makes sense to me that our students will need to enter both the workforce and their own regular day-to-day lives with a sense of how to curate this flow into something useful for themselves and for co-workers, supervisors or supervisees in a workplace.

I will be sharing several tools that can be used to curate and collect resources online. To help with it, I decided to curate my resources to share here for the class. I chose Scoop.it for this since it is a rather new tool for me and I wanted to learn it more.